Myerson Photo Blog

I just added a new series to my iStockphoto portfolio: Little Boy Blue.

It’s true what they say about working with children. You’d better be ready to go when they are, because you only get a few minutes before they are ready for something else. Ordinarily in a model shoot - especially with untrained models - I find I have to keep shooting and shooting in order to get the variety of looks and expressions I’m after. This little guy gave me these five expressions over a span of 8 shots. We were done in under 3 minutes, and about 60 seconds of that was my own monkeying with lights. I don’t even get that kind of signal-noise ratio from static product subjects.

Then again, nobody promises to take static products out for ice cream afterwards…

Timed to coincide with some offline marketing we’re doing, I’ve just launched the new look of myersonphoto.com and myersonphoto.com/blog. It’s a little cleaner, a little lighter, and a much better match for the printed materials that will be going out this week.

There are still some tweaks to make: I have a few legacy details in the blog css to revisit, and I need to rewatermark the sample images on the site so that they all use the new Myerson Photo logo, rather than the old stylized “EM” logo. I hope the new look goes over well!

For this first DIY lighting post, I decided to go uber-simple. We’ll be putting together a lighting box for shooting isolated products. It couldn’t be any easier.

Step 1: Get yourself a box.
Step 2: Don’t throw away the old vinyl liner from the shower curtain.
Step 3: Try not to cut your fingers with the utility knife.

That’s about it. I took a large box (24″ x 30″ x 24″), and cut away the top and a side. I also cut a window in the front to shoot through. Over the open top and down the open side, I draped an old vinyl shower curtain liner (My wife was kind enough to save for it me, rather than throw it away, when it became too disgusting to keep using). As you can see, I opted for the hand clamp method of connecting shower curtain to cardboard.

Inside the box is some posterboard to create my white sweep.

In the setup photo above, you can see the box setup works fine with just a single speedlight. The sample image below was shot with a single speedlight coming through the top of the box. I experimented with a two light setup - one above, and one from the side - but frankly one light does the trick here. If you can afford some noise reduction (that is, if you don’t plan on submitting to iStock, or if you plan to downsample before submitting to iStock), you can drop the speedlight power down to about 1/4 and bump up the ISO to make up for the exposure difference. That allows you to save on speedlight batteries, and have a nice fast recycle time.

The box I used allows for a set up large enough to shoot products anywhere from very small to the size of a small cat. My cat is largish and uncooperative, so you’ll see no shots of her here.  This would be a great set up for an eBay photo shoot, or even for a catalog of smallish objects. The big downside is that it’s a big box that doesn’t store well; there’s no way to collapse it down. The upside, of course, is that it was basically free because I used found objects. If I had to buy the box and the vinyl, I’d have been out maybe $15.

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking to an enthusiastic audience this morning. They were bright, eager, interested and easily amused. And all of them were born on this side of Y2K.

I was speaking, of course, to the older elementary class at Casas Ninos Montessori this morning. They’ve been doing lessons around the subject of photography, and asked me if I could bring some equipment and talk for a little while about what I do and how I do it.

It was a lot of fun. We talked about different light sources that photographers can use (Flashlights? Sure! The moon? Why not!), about light modifiers, about shutter speeds and aperture sizes, and a whole lot more. The kids were really into it, which made it a real pleasure for me. I even set up some lights and let the students take turns taking pictures of each other.

Next week, I’ve got another speaking engagement lined up as well. I’ll be presenting my talk on photography composition  to the Sunflower Photography Club, a hobbyist photographer club located not far from here in Oro Valley. That should be fun as well. I’ve given the composition presentation a few times to various photo groups and it’s generally well received.

This is actually a really cool project. A couple of grad students from Ireland have created this site where you can buy a word (at a dollar a letter) to “redefine” it. The redefinition, of course, consists of a link to whatever site you like. Their example is to buy the word donkey (at $6), and have it link back to your site about donkeys. If that’s your thing.

I bought “affordable” (which ironically was not), “value”, and “superhero”, which link to various parts of the myersonphoto.com site.

It’s maybe a silly way to blow a few bucks, and I have no doubt that this will launch the careers of two young grad students from Ireland. If it nets a few more hits on the site for me, than great. If not, at least it’s fun to see what words have been redefined, and which are still going by their old tired definitions.